Jezebel
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Avant-Garde Assholes
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It looks like Aliza Shvarts' 15 seconds are up: the plucky Yale senior has submitted a new, non-embryonic art project in lieu of her original project, a representation of nine months of self-induced miscarriages that included her own blood. (She would have failed the course had she not displayed any work at all.) In related news, those gross frat boys who held up the "We Love Yale Sluts" sign in front of the Yale Women's Center have been found not guilty of intimidation and harassment charges stemming from the incident. [YDN, Feministing]
Avant Garde Assholes
Excellent essayist and Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum weighs in on the Aliza Shvarts controversy and decides that our favorite art agitator isn't actually all that original, especially when compared to a batty Brit named Mary Toft. "Many artists, including photographer Cindy Sherman and multimedia artist Judy Chicago, have incorporated menstrual blood into their work. As for those maybe-miscarriages and their role in performance art, hoax or some combination thereof, Shvarts has nothing on 18th century Englishwoman Mary Toft. In 1726, Toft became a sensation when she managed to convince the public and much of the medical community that she was repeatedly giving birth to rabbits." [LAT]
updates
Our favorite art school provocateur, Aliza Shvarts, may not get to show her controversial abortion art project — predicated upon a series of artificial inseminations and alleged miscarriages — after all. According to the Yale Daily News, "The University will not allow Aliza Shvarts '08 to display her controversial senior art project at its scheduled opening Tuesday unless she confesses in writing that the exhibition is a work of fiction, Yale officials said Sunday." In addition, two of Shvarts' advisers, lecturer Pia Lindman and School of Art Director of Undergraduate Studies Henk van Assen, who allowed the project to go forward, have been disciplined. Shvarts has also weighed in on the debacle: "I started out with the University on board with what I was doing, and because of the media frenzy they've been trying to dissociate with me...Ultimately, I want to get back to a point where they renew their support, because ultimately this was something they supported." [YDN]
crimson tides
Aliza Shvarts: The Halloween How-To For Harvard Students
Aliza Shvarts '08 is more than just an alleged abortion-inducer; according to our commenters, she is also a style icon of sorts. In fact, we predict that come Halloween, students all over Cambridge and other rival Ivies will be dressing up as the suddenly-notorious art student from that other East Coast institution of higher learning. In order to help them along, we decided to create a handy guide to recreating Aliza's look... Black leggings? Check! Fringe boots? Check! Leopard-print shorts? Of course. Everything they need to create a Shvarts costume (except for the discarded uterine lining), after the jump. More »
updates
Yale: Abortion Art Piece Was "Creative Fiction"
So it turns out that Aliza Shvarts, the Yale student who said she impregnated herself only to abort her embryos using "herbal" methods several times over for an art project, totally pulled one over on everyone. (Well, everyone except Moe.) She didn't really get pregnant a bunch of times, and she didn't really give herself abortions. According to a statement issued by Yale spokesperson Helaine S. Klasky, the entire stunt — Shvarts' press release, visual presentation, and narrative materials — was all part of Shvarts' real art project: Proving people are gullible weenies. More »
i call bullshit
Just How Do You Give Yourself An Herbal Abortion?
So guys, you know you're sort of playing into the babykilling hands of Yale fetus artist Aliza Shvarts here. Not because, you know, her method was maybe a smart way to address the Meaning Of An Embryo — as in, an embryo achieved via modern methods and stripped of all the mostly well-intentioned mix of very palpably human phenomena that generally places such things in unwelcoming uteri (i.e. lust, pleasure, intimacy, emotional attachment, faulty use of prophylactics, the possible attendant never-acknowledged romantic debate over whether said failure is attributable to A "Reason" that can only ever conclude in "I just can't right now") (or, in the case of miscarriage, the tragedy of the body's refusal to abide the desire to procreate) — but because she claims she expelled them through use of legal and herbal abortificients and that is totally an absurd (or "absurdist", whatever) joke. Right, Google? More »
avant-garde assholes
Yale Senior Undergoes Multiple Self-Induced Miscarriages In The Name Of Art
Update: It was fake.
Yale University senior Aliza Shvarts, left, swears she's not trying to "scandalize anyone." Her art is definitely not designed purely for "shock value,". Even so, it's hard to know what to call Shvarts' senior thesis, "a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself 'as often as possible' while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages." Yup, in an attempt to start a dialogue about art and its relationship to the body, Shvarts is displaying plastic sheeting reportedly smeared with the uterine blood and tissue from her various miscarriages and projecting video of herself miscarrying into a bathtub. "I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity," Shvarts tells the Yale Daily News. "I think that I'm creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be." The thing is, Shvarts' art isn't so much commenting on politics or ideologies but her own need for attention.
